Looking for a feel-good cancer survivor story with inspiring platitudes and greeting card lessons? This isn't it

Four days after we got married, I was diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer. Within six months, his new bride was bald, missing a chunk of one breast and two lymph nodes, and had a medical port implanted in her chest, turning her into something of a cyborg. What a lucky, lucky guy.

We had met on an online dating site and eloped in Las Vegas nine days after our first date. Looking back, it suffices to say we didn’t exactly know each other when we got hitched. Surely, cancer would reveal us to each other.

Thankfully, my husband had been through worse: two deployments to Iraq with the United States Marine Corps. Cancer would be a cakewalk, the malignancy a microscopic terrorist cell that had set up shop in his spouse. It was just a matter of bombing the deadly sect into oblivion.

In a Chicago suburb, a female surgeon removed the tumor by cutting a circle around the periphery of my areola and opening my nipple like a porthole. Under the care of a very kind, very short oncologist in another suburb, I spent three months getting dumped full of chemotherapy that made my fingernails and toenails turn brown and peel off.

At yet another hospital, I had thirty rounds of radiation treatments that left a strange, trapezoid-shaped burn across half my chest. As a final measure, I returned to the hospital regularly for a year, sucking up IV doses of a special, terrifically expensive drug that targeted my especially aggressive brand of cancer.

And then, a year and a half later, we were done. I was cancer-free.

Our marriage was intact. My husband had proved his mettle by shaving my head, attending nearly every medical visit, and, for the most part, politely overlooking the fact that along the way I had gained 25 pounds.

There is nothing sexy about cancer, but there is something deeply romantic about a man who wipes black blood oozing from your post-surgical wound, I discovered.

Together, we undertook the serious business of returning our married life to normal. We walked the dogs to the lake. We ate Chinese food. We went to Cubs games and watched them lose. My hair grew back. My nails returned. We took a trip to Hawaii. The scars faded, the burn subsided, and the long hall of the chemo ward retreated into the past.

The social expectation is that one who has undergone a life-altering, near-death experience emerges from the scorching fire of sickness a better person. After getting sideswiped by the Grim Reaper’s murdered out Lamborghini, one is supposed to cherish life more deeply.

After my cancer experience, I kept waiting for the divine epiphany, the great transformation. I had expected I would wake up every morning surging with gratitude at another opportunity to see the sun rising over the horizon. I was sure I would perpetrate acts of kindness on random strangers and relish getting nothing in return. I had planned to take up knitting, or needlework, or finally learn how to cook.

Cancer would not be a curse, but a gift. It would change me. I would become the perfect wife with the perfect life. Nothing would stop me.

Instead, I found, cancer did not make a better person. I was no more kind, generous, or thoughtful. I was not a better wife. I was, boringly, someone who had cancer and then didn’t have cancer. That was it.

Online, my peers in breast cancer survivorship trotted out their best post-traumatic growth stories, which I’m sure go over well at dinner parties and holiday gatherings. I’m a better person now. I don’t take anything for granted. I live in the moment.

Their survivor tales remind me of the online dating profiles I perused prior to finding my husband. In their photos, the men held up dead fish like trophies, referenced stalled careers and failed marriages. Many claimed to be “living life to the fullest.” It didn’t look like it. It looked like if they’d tried, it would’ve killed them.

Cancer is not your friend, and survival is no miracle. Something terrible happened to me, and a team of people in white coats and science saved me. There is no guarantee the cancer won’t return.

There is no happy ending in life, only the twin bookends of birth and death.

I am more aware of my mortality. Sometimes, I long for the days when death was an abstraction meant to be denied. The chemo ward exterminated that. Neither life nor marriage is very romantic. There is cancer of the ass, the lump discovered in the ball, the sudden onset of a heart attack on a summer day about which one can do nothing but let it happen.

It’s been three years since my husband and I eloped. Earlier this year, we moved to southwest Florida. There’s no snow here, just palm trees, beaches, and Maseratis. We persevere. We move forward. We plan trips to far away places, swim in an ocean and spot manatees and dolphins, go to the Swamp Buggy Races and eat barbecue and do the stupid types of things married couples do to pass the days, and the months, and the years, however many we may have.

Recently, I received an email from a male friend. “Did I ever tell you about the time I was in a coma on life support for a week?” it read. “Didn't change a damn thing."

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